The inner contents of my head. Here be dragons.

Sixteen year old me.

I don’t like these evenings where I just feel hollow and utterly unreal.

I suspect the reason for this is that my younger self is out and I’m feeling those emotions from when I was still with my ex and that guilt I felt whenever I was doing something I knew he’d hate. I feel guilty a lot. I suspect that littler me, maybe fifteen or sixteen year old me, is currently out to let me know she’s feeling vulnerable and that she isn’t dealing well with things.

I felt guilty back then an awful lot. He would tell me that I couldn’t trust anybody but him, lie to my face about my family disliking me and he’d tell me to bring all my problems to him. He always promised to fix them.

He didn’t fix a single one. He created more.

I wish I was clean of him and his poison in my life. I just want J, a life filled with creativity, my dog and happiness.

Sixteen year old me hated herself. Her legs had a gap. Horrible bent thighs – that gap used to make her crazy, straining the backs of her knees trying to close the godawful gap that stopped her legs being together in a clean line in first position. Real dancers had swayback legs.

She hated her nose a lot, hid its perceived ugliness under large sunglasses and big eyeliner.

She thought she was the buxom curvy one in her year- the pictures tell a different story. Much more of a dancer shape than she ever believed.

Oh god, let’s not get started on how much she hated and was proud of her breasts at exactly the same time. The paradox was head-splitting. Proud that they were there, but not proud that they weren’t big enough. She bought a badly fitting bra to wear under her leotard and she’s never been in class without one since. The amount of self-hatred that rises when I, as twenty-five year old me, can’t find a bra that fits stems from there. I hate that my back is small and that no store now stocks my bra size,and I hate how I feel when I shop. All of that stems from sixteen year old me. She feels uncomfortable and upset a lot and quite often straight up hates her body. I still get that.

I hope that I will fix the way I feel about my body. Sometimes, these feelings from the past jump back into the future and hurt me in the present. Other things were presents from society and a dance school which thought it knew all the answers.

I am going to soothe sixteen year old me to sleep, and I hope I have better dreams tonight. I’m just clinging on to the thought that one day, this will heal as best it can.